


Measured Out in Coffee Spoons

by Sholio



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Coffee, Developing Friendships, Episode Related, Fix-It, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:33:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25086226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Six cups of coffee, from seasons one and two.
Relationships: Owen Harper & Ianto Jones
Comments: 12
Kudos: 73





	Measured Out in Coffee Spoons

**1\. Ianto's first day**

"Jack!" Tosh and Owen's voices chorused as they burst into his office together.

Jack laid down his pen, opening his mouth to ask what was wrong _now,_ but he didn't get a chance.

"-- a week's worth of experiments, done, gone, _tossed,_ and that's not to speak of the probable damage to the ecosystem once _that's_ flushed down the sewers --"

"-- every one of my tools, according to some system I can't even begin to guess at; I can't find _anything_ , and Suzie's in the same state, she's down there trying to sort it now --"

"-- and don't even get me started on the bleedin' _pterodactyl_ and whatever-the-fuck it's doing here --"

Jack slapped a hand on the edge of his desk. They both jumped and shut up, for the moment. "Slow down. One at a time. What's going on?"

"It's that, that --" Owen pointed through the glass wall of the office in a nonspecific direction. Words seemed to fail him.

"Person," Tosh inserted.

"-- _tea boy_ \--"

"That you hired --"

Finishing each other's sentences: a bad sign. "We needed someone to do the filing," Jack said. "I've seen what happens when you lot do it."

"We don't need a bloody _file clerk,"_ Owen said.

"Are you sure? Aren't you both in here six times a day asking me where something is in the archives?"

"Yes -- well -- he's _cleaning_ out there. Maybe we need a file clerk but we don't need a maid!"

"Owen, you have the housekeeping skills of a frat boy on a bender. Tosh --" Jack hesitated. Tosh was so damned hard to yell at.

"It _is_ nice to have the floor clean," Tosh admitted.

Owen glared at her. "Sodding traitor."

"But even so," Tosh said, rallying, "he really shouldn't touch my tools, should he, Jack? Could you have a word with him?"

"I'll talk to him," Jack said. "In fact, here he is now."

Iato pushed open Jack's half-closed office door with his elbow. He was carrying a tray loaded with three steaming cups, milk, sugar, and so forth.

"You," Owen began.

"His name is Ianto," Jack said placidly.

"I don't care if his name is bleeding Queen Elizabeth the First, he can't go touching my _stuff."_

Ianto set the tray on the edge of Jack's desk and handed Jack one of the cups. He was looking perfectly and immaculately put together this morning -- a little too much so, Jack thought, given that Ianto had been hunting Weevils in the woods a couple of days ago. The transition from feral free-range Torchwood One employee to butler was so sudden and complete that Jack distrusted it.

The coffee, however, was perfect. He inhaled appreciatively.

"Oi," Owen said. "Coffee boy. Stop ignoring me."

"Owen, isn't it?" Ianto said, with a kind of forced brightness. "And Toshiko, correct? How do you two take your coffee? I don't know your preferences, so I've brought the coffee things up."

"Oh," Tosh said, brightening. "Milk, please, a lot of it, and two sugars -- not always, but I think today is a two-sugar day."

"Can we talk about my sodding samples that _you_ tossed out? An entire shelf of them."

"Wait, is this about the refrigerator in the break room?" Tosh asked. "Owen, are you doing experiments in there again?"

"I did clean the refrigerator in the break room," Ianto said as he stirred milk into the coffee. "It needed it." He winced slightly. "Badly."

"That was _science,"_ Owen snapped.

"Which you have a fridge down in autopsy for," Jack said. "Do we need to have the 'science and food don't belong in the same place' discussion again?"

"Here, see if this is right," Ianto said, handing Tosh her cup. "Owen, how did you say you take your coffee?"

"Why is this happening?" Owen demanded, partly to Jack and partly to the room in general. "Why do we have a butler now? How many secret underground bases have butlers? None, that's how many!" A shadow swooped past Jack's office window. "And _why is there a pterodactyl in here?"_

"He takes milk in it, just a splash, and one sugar," Tosh said. She inhaled, and then sipped. "Oh, this is excellent. Thank you -- Ianto, right?"

"Ianto Jones." This was accompanied by a small, polite smile -- calculated, Jack couldn't help thinking. Everything about Ianto was calculated, every little detail in place. Nobody was that polite and helpful and bland. Definitely hiding something ... but Jack was intrigued enough to keep him around to find out what.

"The coffee is wonderful," Tosh said, "and all the cleaning is very nice, but please --" She hesitated, bashful. "... could you clean _around_ my tools? I can't find anything."

A flicker crossed Ianto's face, something vaguely like panic, there and hidden. "Yes, of course. Sorry about that."

"We have our own ways of doing things around here," Jack said, keeping a curious eye on him for other tells. "I think you'll find it isn't much like Torchwood One."

"Oh, so that's what it is?" Owen muttered. "Torchwood One had a butler, so now we get one too? Bloody brilliant."

Ianto took a breath -- steadying, it seemed -- and turned to hand a mug to Owen, putting on a small, blandly polite smile. "Tell me if that's not enough milk, or too much."

"I don't want bloody _coffee,"_ Owen snapped, but he took it.

"I'd like to tell you he's not always like this, but actually he is always like this," Tosh said to Ianto. 

"Oi!"

"Welcome to Torchwood Three, Ianto," Jack said, and couldn't help adding with heartfelt appreciation, "This coffee is really good."

"It is," Tosh said.

Owen made an irritable noise.

"Thank you. So I'll just ... be about it, then?" Ianto asked, with that note of forced brightness that Jack had noticed before. "I was thinking I could get started on the archives today. And if you want to leave lunch orders in the break room, I'll see to it."

He gathered up the tray, folded a tea towel neatly on the edge of it, and left with another little smile and a small, sort-of bow, a dip of his head at the door.

There was a brief silence and then Owen said, "Where in the sodding hell did you _find_ him?"

"Hunting Weevils in the woods," Jack said. They both gave him varying shades of skeptical looks. "No, really. He's from Torchwood One, he's well trained, and we _do_ need someone to keep the archives in order."

There was a silence, and then Owen broke it with a slight laugh, his mood lightening. "This really is amazing coffee," he said, and Tosh nodded. "Okay, fine, I guess we can keep your coffee boy. But he'd better stay away from my science."

"And we really would like an explanation about the pterodactyl," Tosh added.

* * *

**2\. After the Brecon Beacons**

"You look like shit, mate," Owen's voice said brusquely, somewhere above Ianto's head, and then the couch dipped with Owen's weight. "Thought you were supposed to take the day off."

Ianto kept his head down, resting in his palms. He didn't feel up to raising it, didn't feel up to dealing with Owen ... didn't really feel like doing anything except sitting here until he gathered enough energy to get up and make coffee or ... do anything, really. Maybe he _should_ have stayed at home. Except ... he'd rather be here than climbing the walls and seeing cannibals around every corner.

"I needed something to do," he said, and took a breath that tore through his bruised ribs. "I'll be up in just a minute."

"No, stay there," Owen said. "How's the head? Any dizziness? Sensitivity to light?"

"Just a headache," Ianto said. A headache that felt like it was about to take the top of his head off. His face felt hot and puffy, and he had a split lip he hadn't even noticed until it started scabbing over and tugged every time he moved his mouth.

"Mmm. It's usually worse the next day when you take a beating. Take it from the veteran of more than a few bar fights. Give me your arm."

Ianto closed his eyes and held out his arm wordlessly. He felt Owen's hands -- brisk, but not ungentle -- push up his sleeve, and there was a quick sting, followed by the sudden cessation of the agony in his head and a million other small aches and pains that had been masked by the greater hurt.

"What," he said, and opened his eyes. The lights of the Hub were no longer agonizingly bright. He raised his head and looked at Owen, who had a smug expression. "What'd you give me?"

"Alien painkiller. Don't tell Jack. We only have a few doses and I'm supposed to save it for emergencies."

Ianto took a careful breath and found that he could now breathe without feeling like someone was extracting his ribs with rusty pliers. The pain was there, he was aware of it now, but muffled as if under layers of cotton wool. "A headache is an emergency?"

"I'm the doctor. It is if I say it is." Owen flashed him a quick smile. Ianto had gradually realized, with Owen, that his real smiles were so fast that you could almost blink and miss them. "Oh, coffee's on the table there. And the autopsy bay needs mopping because I spilled a gallon of Weevil blood down there. You should probably get on it before it sets. Sorry about that."

With that, he was up and gone while Ianto was still saying, "Coffee?" blankly after him.

Ianto hadn't made coffee yet that morning, in all honesty because the smell was enough to turn his stomach and he didn't want to find out what throwing up would do to his headache. But the nausea had receded along with the pain (no wonder Jack wanted to ration that painkiller; it was amazing stuff). And there was a cardboard coffee cup on the end table beside the couch. 

It was Starbucks, and it was terrible, not to mention that Owen had clearly failed to notice in the better part of a year of working together that Ianto didn't take milk in his coffee. But he drank all of it.

* * *

**3\. After Mark Lynch**

It wasn't that Ianto was _watching_ , exactly. Not as such. It was just that ... he was maintaining a certain level of vigilance, that was it -- glancing at the stairwell as he went about his usual early-morning routine, picking up items and straightening things and very definitely _not_ looking up toward Jack's office.

Owen was down in the cellblocks with the Weevils, and Owen didn't have the best track record at being alone with Weevils lately.

And Jack didn't know. Or at least, Ianto hadn't mentioned it to him. Ianto had merely taken Owen down when Owen asked, after Owen showed up much earlier than he was in the habit of coming in to work, looking like twenty different kinds of hell with his bruises and the careful way he was holding his shoulder. And Ianto had just taken him down there, without telling Jack.

Like a fool.

For all he knew, Jack _did_ know, and for the fiftieth time Ianto stopped himself from looking guiltily up at Jack's office, and looked at the stairwell door instead. It seemed like the sort of game Jack might play. Ianto kept thinking he was through making excuses for Jack, or trying to explain Jack, and then he found himself doing it all over again. This might be something Jack would think of, the kind of thing he might have even obliquely suggested, planted the idea in Owen's head and then stood back and let Owen run to the end of the leash, thinking it'd help him.

Or maybe Owen had come up with it on his own, and was down there now, and the worst part was that Ianto _did_ have some idea of the kind of thoughts that were running through Owen's head right now, the state of mind he was in -- because Ianto remembered how he'd been, after Lisa.

If he'd thought of it, if he'd found a way to justify it to himself ... he might have crawled into a Weevil cage too.

The stairwell door opened, and Ianto jerked hastily out of his reverie and, as he caught a flash of Owen's jacket in the doorway, grabbed the bin-bag and trotted up the stairs two at a time to the break area. While he pulled a shot of coffee, he looked down from above at Owen coming up the steps slowly and sinking into the chair at his workstation, resting an elbow beside the keyboard and staring off into space.

Ianto had picked up bakery items for the Hub this morning, but Tosh and Gwen weren't in yet, so the box was still largely untouched, minus only a jam donut that Jack had grabbed on his one foray out of his office (so far). Ianto picked out a couple of what he recalled were Owen's favorites, along with a couple of his own, and went downstairs with two coffees and the pastries on a small tray.

Owen had his chin resting on his fist, but when Ianto arrived, he looked up with a sort of weary resignation that was so unlike Owen's usual pugnacious defensiveness that it was alarming all on its own. "Yeah, what?" Owen asked with a small flare of weary temper. 

"Coffee," Ianto said, and placed the tray on the desk. "And breakfast."

He pulled the chair over from Tosh's station. She wasn't in yet; she wouldn't object.

"What are you doing?" Owen said when Ianto took the cup of coffee untainted with adulterating add-ins.

"Taking a moment for breakfast before all hell breaks loose again, as it almost certainly will." Ianto gestured at the tray. "There's a sausage roll, which you've all to yourself as none of the rest of us can stomach such a thing at this hour."

Owen gave him a deeply suspicious look. After a moment, he reached for the sausage roll and took a mechanical, dutiful bite.

Ianto claimed a slice of bara brith and reached for a napkin to cover the front of his suit, and leaned back in Tosh's chair.

* * *

**4\. After Abaddon and Jack**

Filing was soothing. Filing was calming. It was quiet down here, in the dry, dark, echoing halls of Torchwood Three's archives. There was a kind of peace to be found here, that Ianto couldn't find anywhere else.

It had been three days since Jack had left, or been abducted, or whatever had happened to him. They'd all spent the first day frantically combing through every speck of footage from the Hub's CCTV and sensors, the Rift activity files, all of it. But Jack was gone, vanished into thin air. Whether the Rift had swallowed him, whether he'd been taken or had gone somewhere voluntarily, there was no way to know.

Owen had doubled down on bitter cynicism, insisting that Jack had left voluntarily, while Tosh was still poring over the CCTV footage as if she could find something they'd missed. Gwen had hauled out a bunch of cold cases as if she thought that solving them could bring Jack back.

And Ianto was down here in the archives, looking through a hundred and fifty years' worth of Rift activity charts and case files on mysterious disappearances. If he could only _understand_ it, make sense out of it ...

Deep down, he had a cold feeling that Owen was right. Jack _had_ left. Left them. Left Ianto. On purpose.

Surely Jack had a reason. Surely he'd come back, any day now. And maybe the answer was here, somewhere in over a century of incident reports and scribbled notes and uncatalogued artifacts and the other detritus of Torchwood Three's operations. 

Ianto set yet another shoebox of unfiled photos and artifacts aside to go through later. He was distantly aware that he was exhausted and hungry and ... he really needed to take a break, order lunch for the office ... when was the last time he'd even stopped to make coffee? It just didn't feel important anymore. None of it did.

There were footsteps, echoing through the corridors. "Ianto?" Owen's voice called. "You down here, mate?"

Great. Wonderful. Just the person he wanted to see. 

There was a sort of unspoken understanding between them right now, that the shooting and Owen's firing and all of it were less important than whatever had happened to Jack; it was a "we do not speak of this" sort of thing, and the situation between them wasn't terribly uncomfortable, just slightly awkward. But Ianto was weary, on edge, miserable in every possible way. He did not want to have to deal with whatever Owen had decided was so vitally important that he had to come down and drag Ianto out of the archives for it.

"Ianto! Bloody hell, this place is huge ..."

... but Owen was nothing if not persistent. 

"Over here," Ianto called.

Owen appeared around the corner a moment later, and stumbled into a pile of papers. "Shit! What are -- huh." He looked around, taking in the papers, boxes, and files scattered on the floor, stacked in neat rows, or otherwise assembled from half-emptied shelves, and then his gaze swept to Ianto, sitting in the middle of it. "You, er ... find anything?"

"Owen ..." Ianto started to rub his eyes, then realized his hands were covered with the dust of the past hundred years. "What do you want, then?" he asked, the frustration spilling out of him. "Whatever you spilled, or broke, or need cleaned up, I'll handle it when I get to a stopping place here, and the faster I do that the faster I can get to it, so just tell me."

"What? No, it's ... here." Owen held out a mug, one of the striped ones from the break room. "Brought you coffee. That's it."

"You came down here to bring me coffee," Ianto said blankly. It didn't compute.

"What?" Owen said, instantly defensive. "Look, it's just ... you're not much use without caffeine, are you? You basically run on the stuff, mate." He crouched down and held out the cup. "Here. I didn't go to all the trouble of making this just so you can run me off."

Ianto took it. The mug was warm in his hands. "You ... made this?"

"Yeah, I made it. I know you don't like the commercial shit, you certainly complain about it enough, so -- here, it's the kind you like, from your precious coffee stash and everything. Don't go telling anybody," Owen added, like his reputation as the office jerk was at stake.

"You'd better have cleaned the machine after." Ianto took a cautious sniff. Hmm. Smelt a bit burnt. He took a sip, and managed not to choke, but only just.

"What?" Owen said, seeing the look on his face. "Is it not strong enough, or something? "

"No, I ..." At least there was no milk this time; Owen had finally noticed. But that just failed to mask the burnt horror of the rest of it. Politeness warred with sarcasm warred with honesty. In his present state of mind, politeness suffered a resounding defeat. "Is this what you lot had to put up with before I got here?"

"Try to do something sodding nice for someone, I swear to bloody _God_ \-- give me that --"

There was a brief almost-tug-of-war that slopped hot coffee onto Owen's hand, making him curse and let go.

"I never said I didn't want it," Ianto said, pulling the cup protectively toward his chest. And there was a smile on the corner of his mouth, just a little one. He didn't feel _good_ , not yet, but ... it was the first time since Jack disappeared that he hadn't actually felt terrible.

* * *

**5\. After Owen's (un)death**

"Better?" Owen said, turning around to shove a cup of coffee into Ianto's hands.

Ianto cautiously sniffed at it and took a careful sip. "I would say ... approaching acceptable, perhaps even verging on decent."

"This is unbelievable," Owen complained. "I have a fucking medical degree. Why is this _hard?"_

He flung himself into the nearest chair. Like much of the break-room furniture, it looked like it had been collected from a rubbish tip, a metal-and-plastic monstrosity that looked like it dated back to the 1970s. Owen tilted it back, leaning against the refrigerator on the chair's back legs in a way that seemed likely to result in a few more broken and unhealable bones. Ianto kept a close eye on him just in case.

"You don't have to make the coffee," Ianto said, setting the cup on the edge of the counter beside the coffee machine. He'd sampled enough of Owen's experiments by this point that he was starting to vibrate slightly. "You're going out in the field again."

"I know, but ... it _does_ make sense, doesn't it?" Owen didn't quite meet Ianto's eyes. "I'm in here at all hours thanks to the not-sleeping thing. I can get the machine fired up in the morning, make sure something's perking when you lot walk in."

"You think it's all you're good for," Ianto said.

"I ... ah ... sod off, would you? Ianto ..." 

He rested his head in his hands for a moment, and then looked up at Ianto. There was something a little bit fragile about his expression.

"So I'm a sodding snob and also a bastard," he said. "You know that about me. I don't think less of you for making the coffee, mate. You know that, right? I mean, I'm trying to learn, here."

Ianto reached out with a foot and dragged a chair close enough to sit down. "You don't have to." He smiled slightly. "You could leave the coffee-making to the experts."

"Piss off, Ianto," Owen said, and Ianto smiled wider. Then Owen sighed and tipped his head back against the refrigerator. "No ... I _do_ want to learn. It's something I can do that'd be useful." The way that he said it wrenched at Ianto's chest. "Anyway ... you know I'm a competitive arse, mate. I don't like being bad at things."

"Is that your way of saying I'm good at something you're not good at?"

"You're good at a lot of things I'm not good at," Owen said, and when Ianto looked at him in surprise, he added, "Shagging Jack, for example."

Ianto threw a tea towel at him.

* * *

**6\. The future that never was (but should have been)**

"Here," Ianto said, crouching in front of Owen. "Coffee." 

He pushed the cup gently into Owen's hands. Owen started to take it and flinched reflexively. Ianto had not yet begun to take his hands away, so he caught it, holding Owen's hands between his own, before the cup had a chance to slip and fall. 

"It's hot." Owen's voice was dazed.

"Coffee usually is," Ianto said. He smiled. "I mean, ideally."

"No, but ... it's _hot_ , I think I'd forgotten what that felt like." Owen's gaze flicked up and then down. He was hunched on the Torchwood break-room couch with a blanket round his shoulders, looking overwhelmed. "Everything is too ... hot, or too cold, or too loud."

"You'll get used to it." Ianto pulled his hands carefully away from Owen's, since Owen seemed to have a grip on the cup. It was very strange seeing Owen's left hand without the ever-present splint and bandage. Stranger still to feel the unaccustomed warmth in Owen's fingers. He'd grown used to the chill of Owen's undead skin. They all had.

Owen sniffed cautiously at the coffee, and took a tiny sip, and his expression turned rapturous.

"Ah, God. That's amazing. You make the best coffee, mate."

Ianto sat on the end of the couch. "Owen, you have the connoisseur's palate of a Berkshire hog. You wouldn't know my coffee from a cup of coffee-shop swill."

"Shut up," Owen said indistinctly, rolling the coffee around in his mouth. He swallowed and closed his eyes in bliss. "Ah. Amazing. You know what? I need to eat something. I need to eat _everything._ I'd murder my sister for a curry."

"You don't have a sister."

"Fine, I'd murder _your_ sister," Owen said. 

"No need to murder anybody's sister. You shouldn't go out -- I expect Jack's going to insist on quarantine for you for a day or two. But we can order in."

"Whatever, I honestly don't care as long as there's a curry involved somewhere." He drained the coffee cup with a blissful expression. " _God,_ that's good."

"You want another one? I can order something to eat while we're at it."

"Would you? Please," Owen said fervently. He moaned softly as he handed over the coffee cup. "I want to do everything. Eat. Sleep. I cannot _wait_ to take my first shit."

"That's completely disgusting," Ianto said, but he couldn't help laughing.

"Don't suppose you'd be willing to help out with a shag."

"Not even slightly. Sorry."

"You're a terrible friend. Absolutely terrible. A complete twat, you are."

"So, that's a no on the curry, then ..."

Owen flipped him off, and Ianto laughed again.

"Still not having sex with you, but a coffee and a curry, that I could do."

"So I'll just be in the bathroom having a good wank then!" Owen yelled after him, and Ianto turned around to flip him off right back -- it was the first time he'd done that since he was a schoolboy, he was fairly sure -- and grinned all the way up to the break-room level. God, he loved that obnoxious fucking idiot.


End file.
